Anyone who has taken a class with Dr. Kevin Karl at Blackburn College can tell you that he is a very intelligent man. He has Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a firm believer in the scientific method. He also has seen and believes in ghosts. When Karl was very young he lived in an old house in Michigan with his three older siblings. Often the children would play in the basement. One day when Karl was walking upstairs from playing in the basement he saw something paranormal. Karl claims to have seen three separate apparitions of varying height looking out of the window. Karl said it looked as if the figures were standing behind frosted glass. He describes these figures as being almost completely devoid of detail, saying he could make out muted color and slight movement. As young as Karl was he said he had no idea what was going on and at the time didn’t recognize them as ghosts. Having almost thirty years to interpret what he saw, Karl now believes the varying heights of the three figures represented a family. The tallest being the father, the intermediate figure being the mother and the smallest,a child. He remembers the smallest figure turning around and taking note of his presence. Karl was unable to see any detail because of the foggy nature of the apparition but remembers being frightened nonetheless. As soon as this happened, Karl ran back downstairs to tell his siblings. His older siblings wrote it off as the over-active imagination of a little boy. Karl says this is the extent of his memory of that particular encounter. “The thing about… memory is it changes a lot over time. Things that you think you remember are probably different than when they actually occurred. I don’t know–and it’s impossible to know how much of that story…has gotten more embellished as my life has gone on,” he said. “So, I can’t say 100% that I have scientific evidence that ghosts exist.”
Later Karl learned that his siblings had all seen a shadowy little boy in that old house in Michigan as well. Karl is not secretive about his ghostly experience, in fact he tells almost all of his psychology classes; using this experience to teach his students about the importance of fact vs. faith. “There is more to life than science. Yeah, science can be a huge part of a scientist’s life but there is a lot more to it than that. We (scientists) deal with belief all the time, beyond the supernatural as well. We take things on faith all the time. Not necessarily religious faith…don’t you have faith in your friends? Do you have any scientific evidence that they are amazing people? Faith and fact aren’t even in the same realm therefore there is no conflict of interest.”